Guess it’s time to strike harder. These rights were not gained by listening nicely to government.
Yeah, very true. If we don’t strike first. We’ll never get to.
But we don’t strike when Marlaina Smith’s people gut healthcare and workers’ rights, so what makes you think our unions will strike for this? Sometimes I feel they’re impotent now.
This is super depressing. I did not expect a lot from Carney but I hoped he won’t be as bad on labour since that contradicts his growth plans. Without strong labour the benefits won’t trickle down and we’d find ourselves in another confidence crisis as prices won’t stop rising. PP will appear vindicated and he’ll campaign on “I told you the banker is a fake”
Crushing labour is a key part of any growth plan. When they say “growth”, they mean short term profits (line go up), not improvements in quality of life.
Skippy pretending to care about worker’s rights. That’ll be… fun. I imagine the Manning Centre’s PR machine working overtime on another makeover right now. Brainstorming, “what do workers look like” and next time he steps out it’ll be in overalls and a big straw hat, or an old school rail porter’s uniform. It’ll be up there with Harper’s weird cowboy leather daddy moment.
It is depressing. Thinking about Carney’s Davos speech where he referenced Havel’s Power of the Powerless, taking the “workers of the world unite” sign out of the window. I didn’t think he meant it literally.
This is a 22 Minutes episode right there.
How the fuck is he a liberal? Who nominated him? How have dozens of former liberals not crossed the floor to the NDP? He is worse than Harper. Beyond PP’s dreams! Fucking alarming.
Liberals have rarely been pro-labour. While the Trudeau gov’t did some positive welfare changes, it tipped the scales on many strikes for corpos. Chretien did austerity and bargaining freezes, etc. Pierre Trudeau also harmed labour in various ways.
The rampant use of Section 107 as a strike-breaking tool started under Trudeau’s Liberal government.
If you look further back, you won’t find labour-friendly LPC gov’t since the 70s.
Mulroney in a red tie.
Capital
Mulroneyin a red tie.
The Cons are the old Reform and the Libs are the old Cons.
We knew that going into the election. I don’t know why Lib MPs aren’t crossing to the NDP but if any of their constituents voted for them thinking they weren’t the Cons then they should be contacting them to floor cross.
Mark Harper.
Never underestimate polyestre’s dreams.
Did everyone forget that the Bank of Canada announced ‘Canadians must accept a lower standard of living’? or the fact their ‘sovereign wealth fund’ idea is literally tax payer funded via debt? or their plan to ‘attract’ 1 trillion in investment (read as ‘private equity coming in and reaping Canadian resources while we give them very favourable terms’). Gee, I wonder why they want to union bust.
This government has forgotten what a general strike is. On the other hand, unions today are so pathetically weak that they can’t even stand up for each other.
Yeah my wife was in a union, she brought a grievence against the employer, when she got to her scheduled meeting the union rep and the employer already had a meeting without her and dismissed it without her getting a resolution.
If the union is in kahootz with the employer then basically your are just paying union dues to support a nothing role for the staff of the union…useless.
That’s a symptom of the same problem of union weakness. If it were easy to unionize and hard to bust we’d have higher union density, like we used to have and unions would be strongly representing their members, like they used to. Or else members would rip the leadership, or form another union. When forming a union is hard and busting is easy (various curbs on right to strike being busting strategy), people try to hold onto the little leverage they get from their less than effective, employer-compliant union because it’s often better than having no union, instead of challenging the union leadership internally to do its job.
general strike
No longer possible. Too many Canadians live paycheck to paycheck, they can’t survive the time it would take to force government action against business.
It’ll become possible during the next major crisis when unemployment jumps to (higher) double digits. Unemployed people have lots of time on their hands.
Unemployed people cant strike.
Sure - but a large number of unemployed, broke and hungry people are going to be very desperate. I believe the saying goes something along the lines of - “every government is just a few meals away from collapse”.
Brain fart. Meant protest/disrupt.
No no no. You don’t understand. People have nothing to lose cause it’s all been taken away.
You’ve proven my point that our unions in Canada are pathetically weak. Sweden’s, for example, strike for each other or make it painful for companies/businesses to conduct unfavourable labour practices.
What a fucking chode.
The only question for classifying a job as “essential” is if someone will/might die if it’s not performed.
If it only concerns profit… It’s not essential.
This is the article it talks about.
adjusted timelines for collective bargaining;
strengthening training supports for workers impacted by artificial intelligence and automation;
updating workplace health and safety protections; and
strengthening protections against misclassification and wage theft, and exploring options to ensure union rights carry over when contracts are retendered.
If that all sounds good, ask why would they ever be consulting with employers on this?
Rail assoc suit was quoted explaining how things need to change because Canada appears unreliable for investment due to the strikes (on rail). Can’t make it more obvious what the employer consultation is about.
If that all sounds good, ask why would they ever be consulting with employers on this?
How exactly do you plan on implementing any of this without consulting employers?
Same as any law. You implement it then they figure out how to still exist.
It concerns workers, not them.
I don’t think you have any understanding of how labor law works. Even adopting very pro-worker legislation requires coordinating with companies. Otherwise you end up with a system that does nothing for workers at best or just drives every employer out of business at worst. There’s certainly more room to shift compensation from owners and executives to the actual workers. But companies aren’t magic infinite money trees. If you write even well-intentioned workers rights laws, but you completely ignore the actual workings of companies, you end up with a disaster.
Consider the example of pregnancy employment protection. You want to help working mothers out, and you want to pass a law requiring employers to offer so many months of paid maternity leave, and similarly paid paternity leave.
If you look into the legal language of these laws, they always have limits on which employers they apply to. And one of those limitations is company size. Imagine you operate a small shop or business. You’re a sole proprietor for years. Eventually things grow enough that you can take on an employee. You’re probably not going to be in a position to be able to afford to pay maternity or paternity leave. Your operation is just too small. You just don’t have the resources to pay people to not work. That one person going on leave represents you losing half of your capacity. If they pass a law requiring you to anyway, all that will mean is that you have to close up shop. No one actually benefits. The new parent you would have hired doesn’t get a job at all. The community loses a small locally owned business. Everyone is worse off. More business shifts to the megacorps.
Now if you’re operating a hundred-person company? You can afford to offer parental leave. You have enough resources. That one person going on leave means you lose just 1% of your capacity. That’s perfectly manageable.
Different jurisdictions and laws set the threshold at different numbers of employees. But they all set it somewhere. And to calibrate that number requires coordinating with employers. When writing such legislation, you have to strike a fine balance between helping as many workers as you can without driving the very businesses they rely on out of business.
And this is just one example. There is no such thing as a policy that only concerns workers, not employers. Even if you don’t care at all about the employers, at a minimum you need to make sure businesses stay viable. All labor labor law, even extremely pro-worker law, needs to have employers at the table as a kind of sanity check.
Driving employers out is fine. We have enough minerals, oil, and farm land that they aren’t needed.
The max we can do is divide all of the profit amongst the workers. What stops a company from existing in that state? It’s nothing, so there’s no concerns to be heard from people other than the workers.
Driving employers out is fine. We have enough minerals, oil, and farm land that they aren’t needed.
You have no idea how the civilization your rely on to keep breathing actually functions.
What role do corporations play that history hasn’t shown you that states can as well?
Irrelevant.
We’re not talking about hypothetical socialist utopias. This entire conversation is about labor law in our existing economy and system. Derailing the conversation isn’t productive.
You implement it then they figure out how to still exist.
Sure, let’s just shut down everything -for the workers!
If the company can’t exist then they aren’t worth existing.
Interesting. If people work in a food production facility and they go on strike then others may starve. This is a case where we’d need to say “Keep working” or get scabs. If people work in a clothing production facility then no one suffers if they can’t get a branded wearable product, so strike away. Doubt this’ll work though as we are more self-satisfiers than we are group-satisfiers. Oh, and greed, money, capitalism (never forget the real cause).
